Various Flavors of Coffee (5 page)
Pausing only to eat a meat pudding at the Savoy Tavern win-dow, I entered the grandest of the bagnios at Number 18. On the second floor, behind heavy curtains, was a receiving room lined with red damask where half a dozen of the prettiest girls in London reclined in their négligés on upholstered divans. But which to choose? There was a girl with glorious red ringlets; another whose powdered face was like the face of a marionette. There was a strapping six-foot German beauty, a dark-skinned French coquette, and more besides.
I chose the one whose long, elegant fingers reminded me of Miss Emily Pinker.
inker looks up as his daughter comes into his offi to
clear the cups and jugs that litter the desk.
“Well?” he says mildly. “What do you think of our aesthete, Emily?”
She takes a cloth and wipes some spilled grounds from the polished mahogany before she replies.“He is certainly not quite what I expected.”
“In what way?”
“Younger, for one thing. And somewhat full of himself.” “Yes,” Pinker agrees. “But after giving the matter some
thought, I decided that may not be a bad thing. An older man might be more fixed in his opinions.This one, I hope, will be less inclined to run away with your idea.”
“It is hardly my idea,” she murmurs.
“Do not be too modest, Emily. If you are to work with Mr. Wallis, I suspect that modesty will be a luxury you cannot afford. Of course it is your idea, and must remain so.” He twirls his safety pen between his fingers.“I wonder that he did not consider that—
did you notice, when I talked about a Pinker being the originator, he assumed that it was me?”
“A reasonable assumption, surely? Particularly as he had not realized at the time I was your daughter.”
“Perhaps.” Pinker watches her as she places crockery on the tray. “Will you tell him? That the Guide originated with you, I mean?”
She stacks up the cups.“No,” she says after a moment. “Why not?”
“I think at this stage the less Mr.Wallis knows of our plans, the better. If I tell him, he may want to know more about the purposes for which the Guide was conceived. And anything we say might somehow get back to our competitors—even, perhaps, to Howell.”
“As ever, you are very wise, Emily.” Her father turns his head, watching the stock ticker as it stutters and pecks at its endless flow of tape.“Let us hope, then, that young Mr.Wallis is up to the job.”
—
lingle
, The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook
*
he next morning it was the turn of Jenks, the senior
secretary, to show me around. If the warehouse had seemed on the previous evening like a cathedral or a church, in the company of Jenks it soon became clear that it was actually a machine—a vast but very simple mechanism for the accumulation of profits. “The material,” as he called the coffee, came in on the high tide; was swept from point to point around the great box of the warehouse; was hulled, milled, roasted and in some cases ground, before being swept out again on another tide, its worth quadrupled. Jenks showed me the books, all kept in his own hand; vast ledgers that recorded the movement of every bag, every bean, as they made their inexorable progress from one column to another.
Most of the coffees that came to this store were destined for
one of just four blends: Pinker’s Mocca Mix, Pinker’s Old Government Java, Pinker’s Ceylon, and Pinker’s Fancy. These blends were not quite what they seemed. Old Government Java, for example, was so called because the Dutch government aged their coffees before releasing them, creating a mellow taste popular on the continent. However, because of the duties on Dutch coffee, the actual proportion of Java in Pinker’s blend might be as low as one-third, with the rest coming from estates in India and Brazil. Similarly, Jenks explained, the Ceylon blend had originally been sourced from Pinker’s own plantations in that country; now, blight having all but wiped out the crop, the name was more of a descriptor of the style than an indicator of origin, with cheaper Brazilian coffee making up more than eighty percent of the mix.
I must have looked surprised, because he said sternly,“It is a standard business practice—there is nothing unscrupulous about it.”
“Of course.”
“Other merchants commonly adulterate their blends with foreign substances. Chicory, oats, roast maize, even sorghum, flavored with wood ash and molasses. Pinker’s never does that.”
“Even though it is, as you said, a standard business practice?” I said innocently.
He glared at me.“I said it was common.Amongst the lower sort of merchant, I meant. Such as Seymour, or Lambert’s. Even Howell’s, for all that they carry the Royal Warrant.” He spoke the names, particularly the last one, with a kind of angry sneer.
“I see.” To change the subject—I had ribbed him enough—I said,“The failure of your estates in Ceylon must have been a blow.” “Not really.The land was cheap, and the labor was easily redi-rected to other crops such as tea. There was a small book loss,
which we have written off against our assets.”
These were terms, of course
—book loss, assets, written off—
that meant nothing to me then. I nodded, and we moved on.
In the office, Jenks showed me how a merchant samples, or
“cups,” as he called it. An exact amount of ground beans was placed directly in a standard-sized cup. After water was added, one waited precisely two minutes before pushing the grounds to the bottom with a spoon and tasting the result.
“Like this,” Jenks said. He dipped his spoon into the cup with a practiced, dainty flick, then raised it to his mouth and slurped it noisily. It seemed a coarse sound for such a man to make, until I realized that he was deliberately sucking in air with the liquid— much as Pinker had done at the Café Royal.
“How does it taste?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I have little palate.” Again, there was a note of disdain in his voice, as if to say that the actual taste of the stuff was best left to people like myself.
“That must be a disadvantage, for someone in your position.” “My concern is with the business side of things.”
“But a poor business it would be, if the coffee did not taste of anything.”
“Then it is fortunate for us all that you’re here,” he said with a sniff. I looked at him, surprised by his tone: it had not occurred to me before that Pinker’s existing employees might have had their noses put out of joint by my appointment.
At that moment the merchant himself joined us.“Ah! I see our new pupil is hard at work,” he commented.“I am delighted to find you so industrious, Mr.Wallis. I confess I had a moment of anxiety last night. From here, after all, one cannot be ‘sent down.’ ” He picked up the cup the secretary had just tasted, pushing his nose into it and sniffing deeply.“You will observe,” he said thoughtfully, “that the smell differs here in the cup and”—he moved his nose a little further away—“from a distance of a few inches. Moreover, tilting the nose to one side
—thus—
appears to intensify the aro-mas.While rotating the liquid with a gentle motion”—he swirled the cup—“release a different set of volatiles.These will all be matters for us to consider in due course.”
“Mr.Wallis was just expressing his reservations in the matter of blending,” Jenks piped up caustically.
Pinker looked at me with a frown.“Is that so?”
“I was just observing,” I said mildly—damn that sneak Jenks!— “what a trouble it must be, to buy coffee in so many varieties, yet to sell so few.”
“True, true. The aficionado will find something to admire about the coffee from any estate, just as a lover of wine will delight in comparing the clarets of Bordeaux with the Riojas of Spain and so on. But we must make a profit, and unlike wines, coffee once roasted does not improve with age.”
He went to the window that overlooked his warehouse, and for a moment he looked down at that great space, brooding.“Think of them as an army,” he said, almost to himself—I was compelled to stand at his shoulder to hear him. “Each regiment has its place of origin, its character, yet each regiment is composed of individuals—fighting men who have given up their own identity to the whole. Out there I have my Highlanders, my Irish Irregulars, my Gurkhas. And just as an army deploys its cavalry or its engineers, depending on the task, so the blender might balance a dull Brazilian with a small amount of Sumatra, or mask the deficiencies of one lot with the best attributes of another.”
“Then, if they are an army, you must be their general, ready to send them into war,” I said. I was joking, but Pinker’s expression as he glanced at me then betrayed not a whit of humor: rather, his eyes were fierce with the thought of what his battalions might achieve.
“Exactly so,” he said softly.“Exactly so.”
We began
work immediately. A burner was brought in and connected to the gas. We were supplied with a copious quantity of
cups and kettles of water, as well as a rough fellow called South whose job was to fetch samples of coffee as we required them. There were also two steel buckets, the purpose of which I was initially unclear about.
“For the coffee,” Pinker explained. “If you actually drink it all, you’ll jump out of your skin.”
We were also supplied with Emily, who took up her position at the side of the table with her notepad. I smiled at her, but although she nodded back it was a professional greeting, nothing more. Of course she was not to know that the previous evening we had copulated at some length on a velvet-covered divan at Number 18 Wellington Street. (The girl I had chosen was pretty enough, but lethargic, her natural lubriciousness clearly augmented by a generous dollop of Clayton’s Grease. Much later, after I had returned to my own rooms, I found my detumescent member to be thickly coated with the stuff. It is a curious thing with whores that one pays a premium for inexperience and lack of ability—surely the only profession in which this is the case. But I digress.)
“I suggest we take as our starting point the remarks Linnaeus makes on the various categories of odor,” Pinker said. He consulted a pocket-book. “Here we are. Linnaeus groups scents into seven classes, depending on their hedonic, that is to say pleasant, properties.Thus we have
Fragrantes,
the fragrant smells, such as saffron or wild lime;
Aramaticos,
aromatics, such as citron, anise, cinnamon and clove;
Ambrosiacos,
ambrosial or musky smells;
Alliaceous,
the smells of garlic or onion bulbs;
Hircinos,
goatish smells, such as cheese, meat or urine;
Tetros,
foul smells, such as dung or walnuts; and
Nauseosos,
nauseating smells, such as the gum of the asafoetida plant. Are you in agreement?”
I gave it a moment’s thought.“No.” Pinker frowned.
“Linnaeus’s system may have suited his own purposes,” I said
airily, “but aesthetic principles dictate a different approach. We must deal first with sight—with color and appearance—and only then proceed to smell, taste, aftertaste and so on.”
Pinker considered.“Very well.”
Having thus established that we were doing this my way, I sent South off to get a handful of coffee from every sack in the warehouse. Eventually the beans were arranged in little heaps on the table before me.
“So,” I said, more confidently than I felt, “these ones over here are as black as despair, whereas these are as golden as virtue—”
“No, no, no,” Pinker interjected. “This is far too poetical. One man’s despair is another man’s gloom, and who is to say whether gloom and despair are the same color?”
I saw his point.“Then we will have to decide on words for several different shades of black.”
“Exactly, sir—that is my purpose entirely.”
“Hmm.” I considered. It was, when one thought about it, a rather vexing issue.“We shall begin,” I declared,“by fixing the very blackest form of black there is.”
“Very well.”
A silence fell upon us. It was, in fact, quite hard to think of a word to describe the pure blackness of the darkest beans. “The pure black of a cow’s nose,” I said at last. Pinker made a face. “Or the glistening black of a slug at dawn—”
“Too fanciful. And, if I may say so, hardly appetizing.” “The black of a Bible.”
“Too objectionable.”
“The black of a moonless night.” Pinker tutted.
“Too poetic for you? What about charcoal, then?”
“But charcoal is not quite black. It is a kind of gray, somewhere between the gray of Cornish slate and the gray of a mouse’s fur.” This was from Emily. I glanced at her. “My apologies,” she added.
“You probably don’t require another person’s opinion, when your own is already so pronounced.”
“No—you make a good objection,” I said. “And besides, the more . . . collaborative we are, the better our chances of eventual success.” Inwardly, of course, I was deeply regretting not having stipulated that this Guide should be something I produce entirely on my own.We had been debating the color black for ten minutes, and I had not even made back the ten shillings I had spent so en-ergetically the night before.
“Sable?” I suggested. “Crow,” Pinker countered. “Anthracite.”
“Tar.”
“Jet,” I said.
Pinker nodded reluctantly. No one could argue that jet was in-deed very black.
“We have our first word,” Emily said, writing it down.“But you should perhaps bear in mind that these beans are only black because we have roasted them to be that way. In their natural state they are actually light brown.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “I was aware of that.” And, needless to say, I had forgotten.“The roast is, naturally, something else we must consider. In the meantime we ask ourselves—if those are jet, then what are these?”With my finger I pushed at some more beans.
“Those are . . . iron,” Emily said.
“Indeed,” I agreed.“Iron they certainly are.”
“This is getting easier,” she commented as she wrote it down. “And these?” Pinker said, pointing at a third pile.